[Third and final instalment of chapter prepared for A Routledge Companion to ANT, edited by Anders Blok, Ignacio Farías & Celia Roberts. Draft October 2018.]

Part III. The characters

The previous section was about the research persona created with Callon’s performativity thesis. It showed that Callon used Garcia-Parpet’s case to create a new position to approach markets. This section explores work conducted after Callon. It revises work that is not set against or beyond but that follows Callon’s performativity thesis, and that, a bit like Callon did with Garcia-Parpet, has enacted different research personae. The following lines distinguish three different characters, three different sets of instructions of how to write after Callon’s performativity.

Before moving on there are two disclaimers to make. Callon’s performativity thesis has inspired thousands of papers in several sub-disciplines (Cochoy 2014, McFall & Ossandón 2014). The distinction between the three different ways of writing after Callon proposed here is informed by years of close reading of this literature, but it cannot claim to be exhaustive. The typology should be read as a tentative classificatory hypothesis. Second, it is worth mentioning that some of the questions posed here have been asked before. Inspired by Ian Hunter’s (2006) critical historical analysis of recent humanities, Du Gay (2010) identified a tension in the work of Callon and colleagues. Sometimes, this work is descriptive and empirically oriented, while other times it is populated by empirically untestable statements. Jenle (2015) picked the label Du Gay uses, the ‘theoreticist’, to characterize the stance of work informed by Callon’s performativity program. He identifies two features: ‘a primary commitment to or prioritization of the development of generally applicable conceptualizations of markets’ and ‘a lack of concern with the object of study as constituted by an empirical state of affairs’ (Jenle 2015: 216). The exercise here is certainly inspired by these discussions. It will be argued, for instance, that Callon’s theory has enabled the development of different personae and that these have different stances in relation to empirical inquiry. The point here, however, is not to evaluate whether the orientation of the performativity thesis is empiricist enough. Neither is it to identify this theory’s overall stance. The point is rather to identify the type of research personae, the implicit characters and the rules set to them, enacted with and after Callon’s approach to markets. Continue reading →

Deadline Extended until 31 August 2014. The Break-Up Of Management. Workshop at Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School, 20-21 November 2014. Co-hosted by The Critical Management Studies Research Group, Manchester Business School. Dr Damian O’Doherty, University of Manchester & Dr Helene Gad Ratner Copenhagen Business School.

Management has become an on-going matter of public controversy. Trust in management, for example, is now widely questioned in the wake of a number of recent crises and scandals taking place in both public organizations (health, education, social services) and private industries – the banking and financial services, energy, advertising, etc. The butt of comedy from Monty Python to David Brent’s ‘The Office’, management is pictured as more or less absurd and for many it will be difficult to imagine that students in higher education actively want a career in ‘management’. Does this suggest that management as a discipline or profession is currently in crisis and that we are witness to the break-up of management as we have come to understand it? At the same time, belief in the necessity of management has not disappeared and indeed appears to be unscathed: more management is typically the proposed solution to any ‘crisis’. Despite a widespread recognition that management entails unintended and unanticipated effects, it continues to marshal hope and belief in creating better and more rational organizations. In this workshop, we seek to explore these dynamics through science and technology studies (STS), actor-network theory (ANT), or critical management studies (CMS).

Fabian Muniesa envía el siguiente aviso: “Friends and colleagues, This call for candidates for the PhD program at the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation, in Paris, may be of possible interest to some of your students. The call is in French (skills in that language are a requirement anyway). Please distribute widely!” Continue reading →

Yuval Millo has the position of Professor of Social Studies of Finance and Management Accounting at the School of Management of Leicester University. He is a leading contributor to the emerging field of Social Studies of finance (SSF), which develops a unified analytical framework that includes elements from accounting, financial economics and sociology and analyses dynamics in and around financial markets. SSF pays particular attention to the technological and organizational infrastructure that affect price formation. Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, Yuval’s current research includes the emergence of electronic trading in financial exchanges (with Daniel Beunza and Juan-Pablo Pardo-Guerra, LSE), the evolution of accounting standards for testing the impairment of assets (with Andrea Mennicken, LSE) and the rise of the Social Return On Investment methodology (with Emily Barman, Boston University and Matt Hall, LSE). Continue reading →